MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

French-Brazil ambitions stir fears of South America Arms Race.

Fears of a damaging arms race in South America have been expressed as a result of French ambitions of boosting sales of Dassault Aviation's sophisticated supersonic Mirage combat aircraft, in partnership with Brazil's booming Embraer aircraft manufacturer.

According to reports from Paris, France is intensifying its effort to supply 24 Mirage 200-5 fighters , with accompanying technology, in a 480-million pound (720-million dollar) deal to modernise the Brazilian Air Force. Press reports say this is causing deep concern in the United States Government worried that it could upset the delicate balance of arms in South America. The London Times Newspaper quotes the Vice President of the Inter-American Dialogue Institute in Washington, Michael Shifter, as saying: "This is a troubling development, which is going to make a lot of Brazil's neighbours nervous. It will make the Chileans nervous... It could risk even making the Argentina uneasy".

Embraer, already one of the world's leading exporters of smaller airliners, business jets and military trainers, hopes that a Brazilian-made Mirage could be sold to other nations in the Third World wishing to replace elderly Mirage, Russian MiG 21s and American F5s.

A 21-year United States embargo on export of advanced military equipment to South America resulted in a period of relatively low spending on armaments by rival Latin American nations. Washington removed the embargo three years ago but no advanced aircraft have been sold except for an order by Chile for F16 jet aircraft, which are less sophisticated than the Mirage.

Brazil wants the transfer of technology to be a condition of the contract for which the American Boeing and Lockheed Martin companies are also competing, though, for political reasons, the United States Government would insist that neither Lockheed's F16 nor Boeing's F18 would come with state of the art electronics.

French firms have no such scruples, as they have demonstrated over and over again in arms sales to the Middle East and elsewhere where they have sometimes supplied weapons to both sides in previous conflicts, such as the Iran-Iraq war. Middle East countries have also been a valuable source of exports of Brazilian weaponry in exchange for oil.

French Stake in Embraer

The French have the advantage of a partnership with Embraer to import French technology to build the updated Mirage 200, a type involved in active serve in the Gulf War, Bosnia and Kosovo. Dassault took